Click on the sections below to explore and learn more about the Phonics curriculum at St Joseph & St Bede.
At St Joseph and St Bede, we have adopted ‘Supersonic Phonics Friends’ phonics scheme to support us with the teaching of systematic synthetic phonics. This ensures a consistent approach across early years and Key Stage 1. ‘Supersonic Phonic Friends’ is based on the well-recognised ‘Letters and Sounds’ approach. Super Supersonic Phonic Friends is an enchanted adventure of phonics where along the way children will meet several friendly woodland characters who represent each literacy skill involved. Supported by the children’s new ‘Supersonic friends’ and rhyming captions and phrases, this approach ensures children develop the confidence to apply each skill to their own reading and writing.
Learning phonics is supported by a variety of knowledge, understanding, abilities, and attitudes that are acquired and developed during early childhood. These are the building blocks around which formal phonics teaching is built. If young children are secure in these building blocks, it is more likely that they will come to phonics with a wide variety of knowledge, understanding, and skill, which raises their likelihood of having a high chance of success.
Supersonic Phonic Friends starts in our Nursery Class and follows a very specific sequence that allows our children to build on their previous phonic knowledge and master specific phonic strategies as they move through school. The focus is on listening and identifying the different sounds we hear in our environment and in songs, stories and rhymes. Once children can hear and differentiate between sounds they are ready to begin exploring how words are made up of sounds and start playing games like ‘I spy’.
During the Foundation Stage year children are introduced to phonemes and their corresponding graphemes. We begin to look at single letter sounds and the representing spelling for this – spelling for the sounds.
Each spelling for the sound has a picture and an action, for example “squishy squishy strawberry.”
Children then begin to read and write three letter words; matching the grapheme to the sound they can hear.
As they become confident and fluent readers and writers of CVC words children are then introduced to digraphs; where two letters make one sound. Throughout the whole of the reception year our phonic teaching relies on the firm foundations of orally blending and segmenting and is deep rooted in rhythm and rhyme. By the end of EYFS children should be fluent with all 44 sounds; including one way to represent them.
In Year 1 children develop their ability to hear and remember more than three sounds in a row and explore adjacent consonants to read CVCC and CCVC words such as ‘think, coast and blink’. They also become fluent at recognising and applying alternative sounds for the 44 graphemes they learnt in Foundation Stage and are introduced to alternative ways to make each of the digraphs they have previously learnt. Through the use of the characters ‘Switch it Mitch’ and ‘Choose to Use Suze’ they recognise spelling patterns and rules to identify which spelling they need to represent the sound. By the end of Year 1 children will have had access to over 100 spellings to make the 44 sounds. Children learn to read ‘tricky words’ with Tricky Tess. Tricky words are words that cannot be read by decoding. Tricky Tess helps to work out the tricky part of the word, “We need to work out what is the tricky part of the word. If it is in blue I will show you what to do.”
Children are also introduced to ‘Nonsense Nan’ who will guide them through how to read alien and real words in preparation for the Year 1 Phonic Screening Check at the end of their time in Year 1.
From Year 2, we continue to explore grapheme phoneme correspondence and learn spelling rules to support our reading and writing development. Supersonic Phonic Friends allows us access to a tailored programme of spelling rules for both children in Year 1 and Year 2.
Our Phonics Lead is Mrs. Caruso
